On the Problems Existed in Chinese Art Education and the Way Out

Nowadays Chinese art education has mostly four problems: The first one is to make art education skilling; The second is to make art education moralization; The third is to make art education mechanization; The fourth is to make art education marginalization. The root of the problems has two aspects: First, the actuality of education system affects current art education; second, the lag of art education development affects current art education. Chinese art education has the only one way out——the eco-style art education that has the fundamental characters of intercourse and dialogue.


The problems of Chinese art education
Chinese art education is multi-faceted and has multi-type.Overall, according to the teaching object, content and training objectives, the school art education system can be divided into three types: The first one is professional school art education, whose goal is to foster the pure artists.So it is also known as "pure art" education; The second is the general art education, including all the non-professional art education from kindergarten, primary and secondary schools to colleges and universities; The third is the art education of normal colleges whose objective is to foster the teachers for art education.The second is the general art education, and the first and the third belong to professional art education.At present, Chinese art education has four main aspects of the outstanding questions: Firstly, the skilling of art education.Chinese art education has inherited the Western academic realism which is good at technical training, abandoned Chinese traditional art education model which cultured art talents through humanistic approach.Particularly, with the introduction of Soviet art education system, the art categories and specialities have been divided finer and finer, and a variety of professional art institutions have emerged.The speciality has been growing increasingly stronger and stronger, but the integration weaker and weaker.The students' technology has been becoming better and better, but their humanistic quality worse and worse.Traditional art education confused professional knowledge, crafts and skills, and ignored the distinctions between them.Art education has emphasis only on imparting and learning knowledge and skills briefly, rather than focus on the thing that the knowledge and skills are improved to artistic ability and wisdom to survive that can contributed to the growth of the lives of individuals.Thus, art education can only be monotonous and boring imparting knowledge and skills, and the sense of life and richness, "language can be ended, but the significance infinite", which only the artistic image has, are gone.In this way, the arts have become the yoke imprisoning people's creativity and imagination, and the students also have become the slaves possessing knowledge and skills, and the art educators have become the mouthpiece and machinery transfering knowledge and skills.
Secondly, the moralization of the art education.. First of all, it is believed that art education is quivalent to moral education.In the traditional art education, moral education is an important part of art curriculum.Art teachers often have centered on teaching the whole works how to express moral thought but neglected the artistic value of the works.Second, In the traditional art education, the art emotional feelings are equivalent to Ethics emotional feelings.The artistic images have been diagrammatized barely with moral and ethical emotional feelings.Thus, the emotional feeling education has brought a very clear ethical purpose, and the art has been made into a tool loading with moral and ethic.The art education that became a tool cut off the bridge that communicates art and human nature.It became a "bad check" that art education can nourish and cultivate human nature.
Thirdly, the mechanization of the art education.First of all, the mechanization of art education is reflected in the teaching process of art education.In the teaching process of traditional art education, because of the misleading of the teaching objectives of moral education and skills, art teachers thought that the teaching objectives of course were completed as long as the aspects of moral and teaching techniques were completed.Therefore, the preaching and spoon-feeding teaching methods were taken.The art classroom should have been interesting and vivid, but it has become mechanical, dull, rigid and stale, and could not mobilize the enthusiasm and keen interest of the students; In addition, the education of ethic and skills in the art education also contributed to the rigidity of the relationship between teachers and students in the teaching process.The relationship between teachers and students is not that of exchanges, dialogue, but the traditional subject-object relations.Secondly, the mechanization of art education is also reflected in the idea that the artistic creation is equivalent to non-artistic creation.Finally, the mechanization of art education is also reflected in the rigid evaluation criteria.
Fourthly, the marginalization of art education.Marginalization of art education is that the art education is not taken serious and have not been placed in a prominent and important position, but have been placed in the edge of education, of which the most prominent manifestation is that art education is non-curriculum-based.The teachers, teaching conditions, teaching hours and so on of art education curriculum have not only failed to be protected, but also often in a state of atrophy.The art education in most schools is basically still in spontaneous "art activity" level, and some even think art education is the extra-curricular activities, and the art education has not really gone into the curriculum areas, and most of them are arbitrary and impromptu, and lack scientific and rational arrangements, and the objectives and content of art education are also not taken into the scope of curriculum.

The root of art education problems
The skilling, moralization, mechanization, marginalization of art education are the four outstanding problems objectively existing in Chinese art education.However, what is the root causes of these problems?The author believes there are two principal fundamental reasons: First, Chinese education system impedes the development of art education.Since the foundation of New China, the main way of selecting talents has been the "test" system.Exam-oriented education system has resulted in deviation from the training objective, "improving the quality of students comprehensively", resulting in the deficiencies in art education in culturing students' quality, resulting in the serious deficiencies in art quality of non-art university students and primary and secondary school students.If China wants to change the embarrassing situation of art education, it is necessary to change the exam-oriented education mechanism into the national mechanism of quality education, and it is necessary to fully develope art education that bears the important mission to improve the quality of citizens.If our exam-oriented education mechanisms is adjusted and reformed fundamentally, we must adjust our educational purposes first--the cadre training should be changed into a comprehensive improvement of the quality of whole people.Secondly, the lag of art education self-development impedes the current development of art education.The lag of Chinese art education development is mainly manifested in two aspects: First, the theory of art education lags behind; Second, the theory of art teaching lags behind.There are two main reasons for the lags of Chinese art education self-development: First, since the exam-oriented education has not changed into quality education, the art education has not been paid enough attention, but more maintained a mere formality.Second, all aspects of art education has developed behind.The laggard factors of art education have led to the relaxation of art education, so it is difficult for art education to play the role to comprehensively cultivate and improve the quality of the students, and the art education is contrary to its fundamental purpose.

The reform and the way out of Chinese art education
Chinese art education has a lot of problems.It is necessary to carry out reform if we want to change the status quo and enable it to develope healthily.However, where will the Chinese art education go?The author believes that there is only one road--"eco-style art education".
The so-called "eco-style art education" is a kind of art education with the dual dialogue and communicating ecological model that accords with the whole nature, human society and thinking (including the deep unconsciousness).It has the main features such as the dual contact, dialogue and communication, and man's comprehensive sustainable development is promoted through the contact between the binary oppositions, communication and dialogue (rather than opposition).It emphasizes the link, communication and dialogue between the binary oppositions such as teachers and students, students and students, students and the world, main lessons and deputy lessons, the curricular and the extra-curricular, schools and society, Oriental culture and Western culture, and so on, and it also stresses the dialogue and mutual generation between the awareness of the humanities and the awareness of science, the awareness of humanity disciplines and the awareness of scientific disciplines.Eco-style art education can change the ecology imbalance between all kinds of knowledge, so that the ecological relationship between all kinds of professional knowledge, knowledge and self, can form.Eco-style art education can create a rich experience of students through art appreciation, and the experience can be further transformed and expressed creatively through the discussion, communication and dialogue between teachers and between students.It is through creating the ecological relationship actively between art classes and other subjects, art classes and extra-curricular activities that eco-style art education enhances the interest and quality of each class and alleviates the students' studying burden positively and effectively.The eco-style art education is an art education of organic integration, which emphasizes the comprehensiveness of students' development, the integration of activity content, the integrity of the activity process, the communication of activities and the equality of teacher-student interaction.It is an important means to improve the quality of students comprehensively, and its purpose is to develop "all-round developed people" with truly rich intelligence.
The characteristics of eco-style art education such as contact, communication and dialogue, is reflected primarily in the following aspects: First, in the eco-style art education, the relationship between teachers and students is no longer the relationship between subject and object, but the equal relationship between subject and subject.Teachers and students stimulate and enhance mutually, and there is a mutual complementary symbiosis between them.Second, the eco-style art education can break the circle of closed awareness which takes "I" as a center, and take an open attitude.Third, the eco-style art education has the fundamental purpose to foster the overall quality of person, and the sign whether the quality is high or low is whether the person has the ability of innovation and sustainable development.Fourth, the eco-style art education pays much attention to setting up an ecological relationship between the different disciplines.Fifth, the eco-style art education treats each unit as an ecosystem.Sixth, the eco-style art education makes use of the teaching method of "event-style".The teaching method, "event-style", is a teaching method that can integrate the professional knowledge the students learn with their real-life activities.Seventh, the eco-style art education can integrate the knowledge of natural sciences with the knowledge of social sciences so that the ecological relationship is established between all kinds of knowledge in the whole range of art education.
To transfer the traditional art education into the eco-style art education, the most fundamental thing we should do is to convert the basis and paradigm of philosophy, because the crisis of traditional art education is in fact the crisis of rationality, and the crisis of rationality is the crisis of traditional philosophy paradigm, and namely the crisis of rationality is the crisis of traditional subject awareness philosophy.This is a bad consequence which attributes to the fact that traditional art education starts from the cognition and purpose behavior relation of subject philosophy.Only to transfer the subject philosophy into inter-subject philosophy, to convert the instrumental rationality to the communication rationality, to change the awareness philosophy into the language philosophy, to stand on the base, can we build our buildings of eco-style art education and help Chinese art education out of the predicament.
In the eco-style art education, all kinds of knowledge learnt by educatee in his mind contact, collide, dialogize and mingle each other, and all kinds of brainpowers intercross, dialogize and mingle mutually.So the educatee has been continuously inspired, trained and edified, and the correct and healthy aesthetic viewpoint and aesthetic taste has gradually formed, and the ability to taste beauty, appreciate beauty, express beauty and create beauty has been cultivated, and simultaneously the good characters have been developed, and the body and spirit of educatee are promoted to all-round development.The person that the eco-style art education trains is not a person with "single vision", a biological person, a "civilized barbarian", a "broken person", a "examination person" or a person with IQ but without EQ, but a "Master", a person standing to sense and seeing the larger issues and the general interest, a all-round developed person, who has developing coordination of body and spirit, lofty sentiment and rich wisdom and strong practical ability.
Overall, Chinese current art education primarily has a series of questions: The art education lacks awareness and attention in varying degrees; The art education management mechanisms are not effective; The art education is made skilling, moralization, moralization and marginalization.The root causes of these problems are: One is the backward educational system, and the other is the self-development lag of the art education.The only way out of Chinese art education is to go to the eco-style art education whose fundamental features are contact, communication and dialogue.The eco-style art education is an art education of organic integration, which emphasizes the comprehensiveness of students' development, the integration of activity content, the integrity of the activity process, the communication of activities and the equality of teacher-student interaction.The eco-style art education is able to fully tap the full potential of people and to improve completely people's all aspects of quality.The eco-style art education is the self-reflection and transcending of the concept of traditional art education, and is the only way out for Chinese art education to get rid of the predicament.